


The Sky for the Reaching

by lavvyan



Series: Traffic Lights [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Asexual!Sherlock, Asexuality, Charity Auctions, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-22
Updated: 2011-05-22
Packaged: 2017-10-19 16:56:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/203086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lavvyan/pseuds/lavvyan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which John isn't quite living in a war zone, Sherlock experiments, and Bill Murray (not the actor) wants to get laid. Features also: pins, sponges, the question of whether or not Sherlock Holmes likes to cuddle, nightmares, a case, and seventeen steps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sky for the Reaching

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Polski available: [Niebo na wyciągnięcie ręki](https://archiveofourown.org/works/761456) by [Pirania](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pirania/pseuds/Pirania)



> This story is for emma_in_oz for her generous donation for the Australian Flood Relief auction way back when (yes, I am that slow where it comes to prompt fics). Many thanks to Kate for the beta and Iona for the Brit!pick. If you don't know Gordon the Gopher, do look him up on YouTube.

**Perseids.**

~~~

Mycroft may have been wrong about John when they first met, but he was definitely right about one thing: living with Sherlock is a bit like living in a war zone.

It's not so much the noise, or the running, or the body parts. That's part of it, of course; Sherlock's collection of heads alone is… staggering. Unsettling, really. There was the one in the fridge, thankfully gone by the time John got home from hospital. There are the shrunken heads Sherlock keeps on the top shelf of the pantry and the taxidermised rodent heads all in one disquieting row on the window sill in Sherlock's bedroom. John is less than amazed by the Albino Sewer Rat of Vienna, and Sherlock's implied personal history with the Giant Rat of Sumatra is something he's never going to ask about. Then there was that… _thing_ … in the shower that John mistook for a loofah. Sherlock looked almost impressed at John's vocabulary when it came to cussing, that time. All those things are perfectly disturbing and perfectly normal when cohabiting with Sherlock, who seems to have taken the word "ordinary" as a challenge at some point in his life and is showing no intention of backing down.

But mostly, life with Sherlock is a bit like a battlefield because it's just so bloody unpredictable. Days may go by in silence and boredom before everything explodes into a flurry of activity, be it because of a case or because Sherlock has been brewing up hydrochloric acid in the kitchen and accidentally inhaled the fumes.

John has lived in an actual war zone, though, and Sherlock's eccentricities are harmless in comparison. Besides, he's always been quick to adapt.

~~~

For all that Sherlock tends to be a bit messy – there is no smooth place in their flat that hasn't been covered with a stack of books at some point – it's generally a clean mess if you don't count the occasional _thing_ in the fridge. Sherlock's a chemist, after all, and as such knows the value of a clean Florence flask when he needs it. His lab glassware occupies the drainboard next to the sink more often than it does the kitchen table, and Sherlock is meticulous in handling the more noxious chemicals he keeps at the flat. Considering that most days, it's John who forgets to put the milk back into the fridge, it would be fair to say he's the one responsible for most of the questionable odours that occasionally waft through their flat.

So it's a bit of a surprise when he comes home and finds the kitchen table covered in bits and pieces of test tubes, burettes, Petri dishes and Erlenmeyer flasks. A brightly blue liquid is turning the linoleum into sticky bubbles where it isn't corroding the stove. Some of it has spilled over onto the hardwood floor of their living room, where it's bizarrely dyeing the wood an aggressive pink. The kitchen table looks like something out of Barbie's dream house. John's going to go out on a limb and guess that whatever it was that exploded so spectacularly, it doesn't affect organic tissue beyond that spectacular discoloration. He's not even going to _try_ and guess what Sherlock had been hoping to create.

In the middle of it all, Sherlock is crouching, barefoot and without trousers, though he's still wearing his shirt and jacket. He's holding a rag dripping with a clear liquid too viscous to be water, clearly trying to control the damage, but he's not moving right now. He's staring up at John as if he's worried that John will turn around and leave without a word. He looks like that sometimes; like he doesn't know why John stays with him. Like he's just waiting for the day when John will say he's had enough.

"This is not what I expected when I started the experiment," Sherlock says, painfully earnest and a little unsure. His toes sink into the floor with a small squelching sound as he shifts his weight. His feet are pink.

John can't help it. He laughs.

He laughs until the uncertain expression has disappeared from Sherlock's face and his lips are tilting upwards. He laughs until his throat aches and he's doubled over, out of breath and full of affection for this half-naked and utterly _ridiculous_ man.

"Pink!" he wheezes, and Sherlock finally starts laughing too.

"This is going on the blog, isn't it?" he asks, eyes bright with humour.

"Just be glad I'm not taking any pictures," John replies. It's almost a crime to let such an opportunity slip by.

"Lestrade will be disappointed." Sherlock starts mopping up the spill again, still grinning his crooked grin.

"He'll live." John gestures at the ruined floor. "Anything I can do to help?"

Sherlock declines, and so John lets himself sink into his favourite armchair – just outside the splatter zone, thank god – and boots up his laptop to look for affordable lab equipment on eBay.

Wouldn't do to let Sherlock get bored, after all.

~~~

"The sponge!"

John doesn't look up from the paper as Sherlock bursts into the room; he doesn't have to. He woke up to find the flat empty, "out; art theft" scrawled in shaving foam across the bathroom mirror. Sherlock has to be the only person to use a semicolon in that sort of note. He's back before noon and isn't shouting for John to bring him _a_ sponge, so the case must be solved already. John doesn't need to be a genius to deduce as much.

"Relevant, was it?" he asks gamely. Sherlock obviously wants to share how clever he is. John is always happy to oblige.

"It was _green,_ " Sherlock says with deep satisfaction, and John does end up putting the paper down after all as he listens to an unlikely story about oil paints and dishtowels and the importance of using yellow sponges rather than green ones.

"The setup was quite brilliant," Sherlock finishes, looking smug.

John has to agree – he didn't understand more than half of that – but what he really thinks is, " _You're_ brilliant."

That earns him a quick, startled glance and then a pleased smile. He loves those smiles. Can't get enough of them; they're so bloody hard to achieve. Both corners of the mouth turned up, nothing crooked about them, expression just a bit less standoffish than usual. It's brilliant, Sherlock looking like that.

"I passed Zavvi on my way back," Sherlock says casually, producing a small plastic bag from seemingly out of nowhere and dangling it on one finger. "They were advertising for 'The Indiana Jones Quadrilogy,'" he pulls a face at the neologism, "but whenever you bemoan my supposed lack of pop-cultural education in that particular regard, you and Mike take great care to talk about 'the three films,' so I bought the trilogy instead."

For a moment, John doesn't know what to say. Sherlock's case was in Kensington. He probably took the tube back – the amount of money they're saving now they're no longer taking cabs _everywhere_ is staggering – but even if he switched from Piccadilly to Bakerloo at Piccadilly Circus, there would have been no reason to get off again at Oxford Circus to leave the Underground in favour of one of London's biggest tourist traps.

Sherlock brought him a present, for no discernible reason.

"Thank you," John says, and then, "You'd never watch telly with me again if I made you sit through the fourth one. It's abysmal."

Sherlock gives him a look which clearly proclaims that all of John's entertainment choices are abysmal and they both know it, but he's feeling generous today so he won't say it out loud. Sherlock's looks can be rather eloquent. But then the look changes, becomes softer, Sherlock's eyes crinkling at the corners. John wonders about that, until he notices the helpless smile on his own lips. He probably looks like a besotted idiot.

"Uh. Do you want to watch them now?" he asks in a feeble attempt to cover his embarrassment.

Sherlock, bless him, lets him off the hook.

"Am I going to need alcohol to preserve my brain from this rot?"

"I'll go," John says, standing. 221C has been the home for several crates of Dornfelder, an excellent red wine, ever since Sherlock solved that case for the German ambassador. John's more of a pint-and-a-bag-of-crisps sort of bloke, but Sherlock likes to nurse a glass or two when they're watching telly.

"Wait." Sherlock holds out the bag and John obligingly reaches for it, only for Sherlock to pull him close. The kiss is light and brief, more of a peck really, but it still makes John's heart beat a little faster.

He clears his throat. "Right. Alright."

He pretends he can't feel Sherlock smirking at him all the way down to 221C.

~~~

 **Sirius.**

~~~

Even if John weren't bisexual, he'd have to admit that as men go, Sherlock is bloody gorgeous. He's tall and thin without crossing the line into emaciated. Even when he's in his pyjama bottoms and dressing gown, he still somehow manages to radiate elegance. He's vain, too; John could run through his entire bathroom routine twice in the time it takes Sherlock to finish fussing with his hair. Sherlock Holmes is a man made of clean, straight lines and sharp angles, or like a tapestry woven without a single blemish.

Such a shame John will never get to make him unravel.

~~~

They're barely compatible in bed. Scratch that, they're _not at all_ compatible in bed. They're such complete opposites it's a wonder they can make it work at all.

Sherlock doesn't do sex; John has been in relationships on three continents that were largely founded on mutually satisfying orgasms. Sherlock does like kissing, but only the slow kind, the sort of kissing that can stretch out for hours and leave John deliriously happy as well as achingly, frustratingly hard. Sherlock will suffer through prolonged cuddling, but he's utterly bored with it. John knows it's a concession to him, Sherlock's way of compromising to keep John happy, but while John isn't above taking shameless advantage, it simply isn't the same.

"You're distracted," Sherlock says. He's lying on his back, with his arm under John's head and his right leg thrown across John's, the sleeve of his t-shirt scratching softly against John's cheek whenever he moves. John in turn is lying on his side with his right arm curled loosely around Sherlock's waist, doing his level best to inhale Sherlock's warm, clean scent right off of him. He sighs and rubs his nose against Sherlock's shoulder.

"Just thinking." He could fall asleep like this, but he doesn't want to. Sherlock's brain will probably try to eat itself if he has to stay like this for more than an hour.

"Should I go and fetch the first aid kit?" Sherlock sounds concerned. John kicks him.

"You're a riot," he mumbles, nosing Sherlock's sleeve up so he can bump a kiss to the salty skin beneath. Sherlock shivers slightly. John sighs. "Sorry."

Sherlock is silent for a long moment.

"John, if you want me to…" he says awkwardly, "that is, if your, uh, relations with your left hand are insufficient for your continued… Do you want my assistance?"

John loves him so much it hurts. In his throat, in his chest, it hurts, like there's too little space and too much emotion. He's suddenly, irrationally afraid it's going to spill over, all of it, and then where will they be?

"No," he says, "I don't."

Sherlock mulls this over.

"Do you believe my… performance… would be sub-par?" He sounds offended by the idea.

John snorts. "No. God, no. The way you play the violin when you can be arsed to, I've no doubt your fingers would be… no." He clears his throat.

"Then why?"

"You don't want to." Before Sherlock can protest, John adds, "I know it's not coercion. You're an adult, you can make up your own mind. But it wouldn't feel right. For me."

Sherlock thinks this through as well, taking his time about it, but all he says is, "Ah."

John settles back down. Sherlock really is quite unfairly comfortable for someone who doesn't like to cuddle. His skin is warm, he smells good, and he's breathing slowly and steadily enough to make John's eyelids droop. John is so relaxed he feels like he could melt right through the mattress.

"Go to sleep," Sherlock says suddenly.

John has an intelligent reply to that. Really, he has. But this conversation has taken so many unexpected turns that he's starting to wish for a map just so he can figure out where the hell they're going. "Huh?"

"Go to sleep, John." Warm breath gusts through John's hair as Sherlock kisses the top of John's head. "As you're so fond of saying: it's fine."

John thinks about protesting. He thinks about pointing out that Sherlock still isn't tired and doesn't do well with boredom, no matter how many hours he can spend motionless on the sofa. He thinks about rolling away from Sherlock and going to sleep uncuddled so that Sherlock can get up. He even thinks about getting up himself, doing something productive, maybe reading one of his medical journals.

What he does is inch closer to Sherlock until no space is left between them. Sherlock lets out an amused huff, and John pretends that Sherlock isn't laughing at him.

Every now and then, John will forego James Bond in favour of incomprehensible Korean horror films where even Sherlock can't predict the next plot turn. Every now and then, Sherlock will interrupt his mad dashing about to drag John into a restaurant and let him get at least a few bites of a warm meal. John will never have sex again. Sherlock will cuddle.

Seems fair enough.

~~~

Their last case was a mad one. Sherlock uncovered a charity fraud, cleared a man's name, prevented a wedding, destroyed a priceless artefact, found an even greater treasure in the shards, saved an orphan-turned-heiress, and solved a murder over a decade after the fact.

Even Lestrade had to pause for a minute after they'd finished giving their statements before he admitted that, alright, that _was_ rather impressive.

The downside is becoming more obvious by the second. They're taking a taxi back home because John isn't about to let Sherlock brave the tube after four days without sleep – on Sherlock's part, because John is a doctor and more sensible than that – and sure enough, Sherlock is crashing fast. He's blinking owlishly into the headlights of the oncoming traffic, dark smudges beneath his red-rimmed eyes. His skin looks paper-thin and pasty, and from the way he's swaying gently into every turn, John is guessing that at this point, Sherlock is running on sheer bloody stubbornness.

He's never seen him this exhausted.

Back at Baker Street, Sherlock looks at the stairs up to their flat as if they're some sort of magnificently complicated puzzle he can't solve right now. John sighs and pulls him close, and together they manage the daunting climb with nothing worse than a few muttered curses and a banged knee. Sherlock starts to fumble with the buttons of his jacket, but John bats his hands away before Sherlock can tangle his fingers in the buttonholes badly enough to break something.

"Stop it." John's doctor voice has become familiar enough to Sherlock that he doesn't argue, but his meek acquiescence only serves to increase John's worry. Still, he gets Sherlock out of jacket and shirt and is reaching for Sherlock's trousers when Sherlock's hand lands on John's shoulder.

His fingers are trembling.

"Come to bed with me," Sherlock says urgently. His bloodshot eyes are glazed with fatigue, but he's staring at John like he'll drill a hole into John's skull and shove the order inside if he has to.

"Sorry?" John is aware of how odd they must look, him with his fingers frozen on Sherlock's zip and Sherlock looking like something that shuffled out of a George Romero movie.

"I can't sleep," Sherlock whispers, as if he's divulging a great secret. "My mind isn't like yours. It never stops."

There's probably an insult in there, but John's become good at ignoring those.

"What, and you need me to slow it down?"

He's expecting a firm, if wobbly, rebuttal, but Sherlock nods. His hand clutches at John's shoulder.

"You make it better," he says, "You make it calmer."

John gapes. That's… unexpected, to say the least.

"I thought you didn't like calm," he says stupidly.

"You're an idiot," Sherlock declares, but it sounds like another three words entirely.

John has to swallow around the sudden lump in his throat. "Alright, then. Let's go to bed."

It's Sherlock who curls up with his head on John's shoulder this time; Sherlock who hooks an arm around John's waist as if he's afraid John might move away. John holds on, still stunned long after Sherlock has dropped off to sleep. He's obviously made a mistake when he evaluated their relationship, but he can't figure out where.

 _Sod it,_ he thinks eventually. _Sherlock Holmes in love. That's not the oddest thing that's ever happened to me._

But it may just be the best.

~~~

 **The Milky Way.**

~~~

John is… better, these days. When he dreams, he doesn't remember his blood in the grass and wish there had been more of it. He doesn't want his dying scream to join those around him, and he doesn't wake choking on his envy. When his dream-self operates on dozens upon dozens of doomed men, it's not his own face that keeps staring up at him, slack and grey and utterly serene.

But he still dreams. And that's… not better.

~~~

John jerks awake in the indeterminate stretch between midnight and three o'clock in the morning. He always does when he has a nightmare. His eyes burn with fatigue and his breath comes too fast, and it's always too late and too early to do anything useful. Back at his old room, he would have stayed in bed and willed himself back to sleep. Tonight, he pads down the stairs to the living room.

Sherlock is sitting on the sofa, with his feet on the coffee table. He's painting his toenails. John stops in the doorway for a moment, blinking and noticing absently that Sherlock's fingernails are already glittering in varying shades of navy that go alarmingly well with his dressing gown. Sherlock looks up. John shakes his head, and wanders into the kitchen.

They have nearly two dozen different sorts of tea – for a case, Sherlock claimed when he brought them, but John suspects he simply likes variety when he's not eating – and John reaches for something called Big Chill, knowing it will help him relax. He puts the kettle on and grabs two mugs.

"Ginger lemongrass for you?"

"Thank you," comes Sherlock's absent reply. John smiles; Sherlock's always more polite when he's concentrating on something else.

He makes their tea, carries it back into their living room, and sets Sherlock's mug carefully on the table next to far too many bottles of nail polish before he lets himself sink back in his armchair.

"I need to know how fast it dries," Sherlock says, contorting himself so he can reach his little toe.

"I wasn't going to ask." John knows better by now.

Sherlock smiles briefly and switches to his other foot.

"What did you do in Afghanistan?"

John's left hand jerks, almost spilling the tea. "Sorry?"

"You would have known the dangers of sleep deprivation. Soporifics are not an option in a military environment even if you were fond of them, which you are not." Sherlock still isn't looking at him. In a way, that makes this conversation easier. John can set down his tea and cross his arms and pretend it's just because his pyjamas are thin and the living room is rather cold. "You are fond of routines, however, so I ask again: what did you do in Afghanistan? It's not something you can do here, or you would be doing it now. You're intelligent enough to put emotional discomfort aside in favour of a coping mechanism that has already proven itself useful."

John lets out a long, shuddering breath. He never talked about this. He doesn't know why he's going to talk about it now, other than that it's too late and too early and Sherlock is doing the asking. "It's… it was silly."

Now Sherlock does look at him, just a brief glance, but enough to convey disbelief. "John, I'm in the process of painting my toenails. This is not my kink."

"What is your kink?" John asks, momentarily derailed. Can Sherlock even have one, if he doesn't like sex? God, it's not the thing with the corpses, is it?

"Focus."

"Fine." John scratches his eyebrow and licks his lips. "I counted the stars. It was…" _Come on, John, you were a soldier. You can bloody act like one._ He squares his shoulders and shakes his head. He doesn't usually allow himself to get unbalanced quite so easily, even if it's godforsaken o'clock in the morning. "The sky in Afghanistan was endless. Or, that's what it looked like. So many stars." He smiles wryly. "Every time I'd try counting them, I'd have to start over. Every time I started over, I didn't get as far as before. By the fourth time, I was usually tired enough to go back to sleep. Much harder in London, though."

"Light pollution," Sherlock says slowly.

"It's a bitch," John agrees. He sighs. "Listen, I'm going back to bed. Do you want a fresh tea?"

"No, leave it," Sherlock says. He's still holding the little brush, but his toenails remain half-painted as he stares into space.

That's the trouble with having a computer for a brain, John thinks as he walks up the stairs. Only so much processing space for any one thing. Maybe he'll put that on the blog some day, just to see Sherlock's indignation.

The next day finds Sherlock fiddling around in the kitchen with a small bucket of paint and a huge bucket of pins in various shapes and sizes. John watches him for a moment. He'd have thought that Sherlock would continue his investigation into John's psyche, but apparently the subject has been closed.

Except it hasn't.

~~~

"Why are there half a million pins stuck to my bedroom ceiling?" John thinks this is a reasonable question. He trusts Sherlock enough to be sure the whole, pointy mass isn't going to rain down on him some time during the night, but it's still his bedroom and he'd very much like to know.

"Experiment." Sherlock seems glued to the eyepiece of his microscope. He smiles briefly. "Half a million, really? Did you count them already?"

Oh. Is that where this is going?

"I don't sleep with the light on, Sherlock," John says, exasperated and a little touched. They both know that his nightmares come in threes and fours. It never stops with one night of bad dreams, no matter if John sleeps alone or if Sherlock deigns to cuddle. It's better when someone's there, though. Easier to fall asleep.

"Of course not."

John waits. Sherlock doesn't budge, apparently fascinated by whatever his slides are showing. John sighs. "You're not going to bed, are you?"

"I might join you later," Sherlock says vaguely, and John gives up. If needly death awaits him, he will have to face it alone.

He puts on his pyjamas and brushes his teeth. He gets a glass of water and sets it on the bedside table before he crawls into bed and gives the pins in his ceiling a wary glance. He turns off the bedside lamp.

And holds his breath.

Tiny pinpricks – pin _heads_ , John realises somewhere between hysteria and awe – of light are glowing on the ceiling. Tiny ones, and bigger ones, arranged into patterns and constellations as amazing as the Afghan sky. Some of the larger pinheads are forming an odd shape, like a ragged triangle or a corner of Swiss cheese. Or a molecule. John can't hold back a ragged laugh when he realises what he's looking at. Oxytocin. The love hormone.

"Sherlock, you lunatic," he whispers.

A bucket full of pins, fluorescent paint, and a declaration. There's only one thing to do, really.

"One," John starts once his sight has stopped blurring, "two, three, four, five…" He will count the whole night, if he has to. He will count over and over until he knows, to the last pin, exactly how lucky he is to share a flat with a genius.

He falls asleep before he reaches a hundred.

~~~

 **Aurora Borealis.**

~~~

Much as John is caught in Sherlock's orbit, his life isn't all Sherlock, all the time. He has his job at the surgery; two shifts every week that Sherlock has to work without him. If that means a lot of running about and occasionally getting shot at after eight hours of seeing patients, it's still a small price to pay for every time Sherlock remembers not to run off until there's someone who will watch his back. They've got rather good at this partnership thing by now.

John also has his afternoons with Harry, when they can both be arsed to ignore how much they dislike each other, and nights at the pub with his mates. Alright, _Mike's_ mates, since Mike seems determined not to let John turn into a social hermit. He means well and John owes him, so at least once a month he finds himself in one of half a dozen pubs with half-decent beer and actual English staff at hand, discussing tube maintenance and the sorry state of the economy and whether Lehmann's return to the Gunners will mean they're going to get United by the bollocks this year.

It's nice to spend an evening every once in a while that's not dominated by Sherlock's moods, Sherlock's cases, Sherlock's whims.

It's also a tad boring.

~~~

They're a small group tonight, which suits John just fine. Sherlock has been sulking on the sofa for two days now. It's not quite depression – and Sherlock would object to any sort of medication anyhow – but John's a doctor; he wants to help. It's what he does. Watching Sherlock be miserable and knowing there is nothing he can do, nothing he'd be allowed to do, is exhausting enough that John is still nursing his second pint while everyone else is at their fourth at least.

'Everyone else' is Mike, of course, who seems to hate his students a little more each time they meet. Then there's Dave, Mike's brother-in-law, who works in R&D and has an opinion on everything. One of these days, John is going to give him Mycroft's phone number, just to see what Mycroft would make of Dave's ideas on how to run the country. The other two at their table are Pawan, a specialist in reconstructive surgery, and Kieron, who doesn't seem to have a job at all but shows up every time someone mentions the word 'beer'.

Unsurprisingly, Dave and Kieron get on like an entire district on fire.

"… and then she starts giggling, and it's like sharing a bed with Gordon the sodding Gopher!" Dave downs the rest of his beer and slams the pint down as he laughs. Everyone laughs with him. It's a nice story; made up, of course, but isn't that the point? The mental image of skinny, terrifyingly ginger Dave in bed with Gordon the Gopher is hilarious.

"What about you, John?" Kieron asks. "Surgeon's hands, eh? Did they like that in Afghanistan? Conduct any lengthy… examinations?" He leers, and Dave dissolves into a fit of giggles that would have made Gordon proud.

John stiffens.

"No," he says shortly, smiling to take the sting out of it.

He'd been a soldier in Afghanistan, not a doctor. His job had been to shoot at people, and he'd been very good at it. The only 'lengthy examinations' he conducted had been sloppy, unsanitary, and consisted mostly of seeing if he could pack someone's guts back into their abdominal cavity before they bled out, and keep them alive long enough for the medics to get there.

Some of that must be showing on his face. Dave has stopped giggling, and Mike is looking at John with far too much sympathy in his eyes. Kieron blinks as if he's waiting for someone to explain what's going on.

John's pulls his hands from the table so no one will see them clench into fists.

"I had a girlfriend once who had things to say about surgeons' hands," Pawan says suddenly, and launches into a wildly exaggerated tale about surgical gloves, his girlfriend, and the Kama Sutra. Kieron perks up, and even Dave starts laughing again when Pawan starts detailing his 'tactical preparations.'

John slowly relaxes, privately vowing to buy Pawan an extra pint next time.

"Sorry, mate," Mike says quietly.

"It's fine," John replies. Anything that isn't fine is his own problem, not anyone else's. He'll tell a story, later, about a nurse he once knew and a position she called 'the helicopter,' and everything will be… fine.

He wants to go home. Convince Sherlock to have a cuddle on the sofa, maybe have some pad thai while they watch one of Sherlock's unbearably complicated horror movies. He'll talk Sherlock into peeling off half the nicotine patches, and Sherlock will send him to fetch more tea, or milk, or someone's laptop. They'll bitch and they'll bicker and maybe John will fall asleep on the couch, or Sherlock will share his bed, or John will sleep in his own bedroom, where a new pattern will have appeared on the ceiling. A cipher or a molecule or a map of the London Tube, made up of roughly 750 pins of varying sizes, but never the same number.

God, he can't wait to go home.

~~~

He has another pint and tells his story. He makes the right gestures in the right places and Dave laughs so hard he nearly falls off his chair. John grins and sips his beer and tries to convince himself he's having fun.

He's never been a very good liar.

Finally, John gets up to settle his tab and fetch his jacket. He says goodbye to his – Mike's – mates and grabs a last handful of crisps to sustain him until he gets home. He opens the door, steps out into the street…

… and finds himself face-to-face with a private consulting detective.

"Sherlock!" John jerks back, crisps crumbling in his clenching fist. "What?"

Sherlock looks him up and down. His eyes are shining with manic energy. "Ah, good, you've only had three pints. Enough snacks to neutralise at least some of the alcohol in your system; perfect. Lestrade sent a text: locked-door murder in Bexley, no forensic evidence, no suspect, no apparent motive. The victim had no relatives or close friends, no immediate social circle. It's _delightful._ "

Sherlock grins like a kid at Alton Towers, and John can't help the way his heart beats faster.

"No clues?"

Impossibly, Sherlock's grin grows wider. "Anderson hasn't found any, if you can believe it." He gestures at the taxi idling behind him. "Coming?"

John shouldn't. He should go home and get some sleep and call Sarah about that possible third shift she mentioned. He should make Sherlock return his gun – because John doesn't doubt for a second that Sherlock has brought it – and point out that there is such a thing as police procedure. He should be sensible.

He considers the likelihood of Sherlock getting shot at, breaking and entering, mouthing off to the wrong people, and generally putting himself in harm's way. It's a very high percentage.

"Who's going to blog about it if I don't?"

Sherlock's whole posture changes. "A blog! Online social networks, of _course_!" He grabs John and pulls him into a quick, stunned kiss. "I love it when your quaint notions lead to useable data," he declares, all but leaping into the taxi.

John laughs, and follows Sherlock into battle. London may not be a war zone. But John is, and always will be, a soldier.

He has Sherlock's back.


End file.
